expert oracle enterprise manager 12c

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Architecture by Pete Sharman Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c referred to hereafter as EM12c is the latest version of Oracle Corporation’s

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Contents at a Glance

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Chapter 1: Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Architecture

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control

12c Architecture

by Pete Sharman

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c (referred to hereafter as EM12c) is the latest version of Oracle Corporation’s

end-to-end management tool for both Oracle and non-Oracle technology Previously known as Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) or Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, the tool has been around for quite some time now The 12c release, though, is a landmark version that makes huge advances in terms of both the breadth and depth of its functionality In many ways, this release has moved Enterprise Manager from being a database administrator’s monitoring tool, to a tool that can

be used to manage your entire data center EM12c now covers several focus areas, including the following:

Framework and infrastructure: EM12c provides security, scalability, a rich user interface,

the new Self Update functionality, and more

Enterprise monitoring: You can monitor the status of your entire infrastructure, including

databases, middleware, and applications EM12c provides ways of notifying you when

issues arise, resolving them, and reporting on them

Cloud management: Managing the cloud is a hot topic in the industry today, and EM12c

provides a range of solutions in this space, including chargeback/showback, policy-based

resource management, and self-service provisioning

Lifecycle management: Administering computing systems today requires many

manual processes for the discovery, provisioning, patching, change management, and

configuration management of those systems EM12c automates many of these manual

processes, freeing the administrator to spend more time on other, higher-priority tasks

Database management: Managing databases has been a key feature of OEM since its

first release That continues in the EM12c release, including solutions around patching,

upgrading, provisioning, performance tuning, data masking, and subsetting, as well as

configuration and change management

Middleware management: A key component of EM12c is providing comprehensive

management capabilities across all of Oracle’s middleware products (including WebLogic

Server, SOA Suite, Identity Management, WebCenter, and Coherence), as well as

non-Oracle middleware (such as IBM’s WebSphere or JBoss Application Server)

Application management: Monitoring and management solutions for all the

Oracle-provided applications (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, and

Fusion Applications) come out of the box with EM12c, in addition to capabilities for

Application performance management: EM12c delivers end-to-end monitoring of your

applications, including real-user monitoring via Real User Experience Insight (RUEI)

as well as synthetic-transaction monitoring via Service Level Management beacons

Other functionality introduced here includes the ability to monitor and trace business

transactions, topology discovery, and Java and database monitoring and diagnostics

Application quality management (AQM): Three areas of testing are provided—application

testing via the Application Testing Suite product, infrastructure testing via Real Application

Testing and Application Replay, and test data management functionality that includes test

system creation, data masking, and data subsetting technologies

Hardware and virtualization management: Complete lifecycle management is offered for

both physical and virtual environments, including provisioning, patching, configuration

management, administration, and monitoring This includes managing systems running

on Linux, Unix, Windows, and Oracle Virtualization Server (Oracle VM Server) operating

systems, as well as providing insight into the server, network, and storage layers for systems

built on top of Oracle Sun hardware

Heterogeneous (non-Oracle) management: Supplying a range of extensions known as

connectors and plug-ins (among others), EM12c provides capabilities to manage

non-Oracle technology in addition to Oracle environments These extensions could be

built by Oracle, partners, or even customers themselves They are based on the same

management framework as the rest of the EM12c product, and so can be downloaded,

imported, and deployed by the Self Update mechanism

Coverage of all these focus areas adds up to a robust product for managing the complete data center The rest

of this book drills into the details of many of these areas The remainder of this chapter introduces you to the basic architecture that you need to understand before delving further into the wonders of EM12c

Architecture Overview

From an architectural perspective, EM12c is composed of five main parts:

Cloud Control console

■ a discussion of the licensing for eM12c is beyond the scope of this book (an entire licensing document is available

in the enterprise Manager documentation at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/license.121/e24474/toc.htm.) however, it’s worth noting that, in general, most of the basic functionality described here carries a restricted-use license and therefore is free this restricted-use license refers specifically to enterprise Manager, however, and many add-on options do come with license costs refer to the licensing documentation for full details.

The Cloud Control Console

The Cloud Control console provides the user interface that you use to access, monitor, and administer your computing

environment The console is accessed via a web browser, thus allowing you to access the central console from any location You can customize the EM12c console much more than in previous releases, allowing you the following options:

Choosing your home page from various predefined pages (or indeed setting any page you

•

want to be your personal home page)

Moving regions around on a target home page

on the new menu-driven interface Figure 1-1 shows an example of the default home page

Figure 1-1 The new default home page in EM12c

Oracle Management Agents

An Oracle Management Agent (usually referred to as simply an agent or abbreviated to OMA) is generally installed

on each host that is monitored in your computing environment (EM12c also introduces the capability to manage environments remotely in some cases.) These agents are deployed from the console (see Figure 1-2), and then monitor all the targets that have been discovered by the agents They are used to control blackouts on those targets, execute jobs, collect metrics, and so forth, and in turn provide details such as availability, metrics, and job statuses back to the Oracle Management Service

For the EM12c release, agents were completely rewritten from the ground up for greater reliability, availability, and performance (see the upcoming section on plug-ins for details of how this was achieved) The only downside of this change is that you must use an EM12c agent to talk to the EM12c Oracle Management Service Backward compatibility between 12c and earlier agents was lost because of the number of changes that were made in the new release.

Oracle Management Service

The Oracle Management Service (OMS) is a web-based application that communicates with the agents and the Oracle

Management Repository to collect and store information about all the targets on the various agents (Note that the information itself is stored in the Oracle Management Repository, not the OMS.) The OMS is also responsible for rendering the user interface for the console

The OMS is installed into an Oracle middleware home, which also contains the Oracle WebLogic Server

(including the WebLogic Server administration console), an Oracle Management Agent for the middleware tier, the management service instance base directory, the Java Development Kit (JDK), and other configuration files You can install the OMS into an existing WebLogic Server (WLS) configuration if it exists, but usually it is better from an availability perspective to have it installed in a dedicated WLS home

Oracle Management Repository

The Oracle Management Repository (also called the repository or OMR) is an Oracle database that stores all the

information collected by the various management agents It is composed of database users, tablespaces, tables, views, indexes, packages, procedures, and database jobs

Unlike the OMS, the installation process for the OMR requires that a database already exists for the repository This means you need to have created the database somewhere in your environment prior to installing the OMS Again, it is typically recommended for the repository to be created in a dedicated database

Figure 1-2 User interface for managing agents within EM12c

Plug-ins take on a whole new meaning in EM12c In earlier releases, plug-ins were largely system-monitoring utilities

used to monitor and manage non-Oracle (heterogeneous) software including databases and middleware Partners

or Oracle Corporation itself usually built them Some technically savvy customers built their own as well, but there weren’t many plug-ins overall

In the EM12c release, a few of these monitoring plug-ins remain, but plug-ins have been greatly expanded to include every target type being managed As such, there is now an Oracle database plug-in to manage Oracle databases,

a Fusion Middleware plug-in to manage Oracle’s middleware, a Fusion Application plug-in to manage Oracle’s Fusion Applications product suite, and so on Because new releases of the Oracle software will include plug-ins used to manage that software, this means EM12c (and later releases) will be able to monitor and manage those releases much more quickly than has been the case in the past Plug-ins can be downloaded, applied, and deployed using the new Self Update functionality available from the Cloud Control console (if you have sufficient privileges to use it)

In addition, this modular plug-in architecture means that an agent is no longer configured to be able to monitor any target type Now, an agent will download only the plug-ins that are needed for the targets that the agent is

monitoring This means the agents themselves are smaller than they were in previous releases This change is one of the biggest improvements in the architecture of the EM12c release

A High-Availability EM12c Configuration

In the most basic of EM12c installations, the OMS and the repository can be physically located on a single machine However, Oracle recommends placing these two components on different machines Figure 1-3 shows the simplest installation

Target with

OMA /plug-in

Target withOMA /plug-in

Although this relatively simple architecture may be sufficient for an initial deployment, you might need to grow

it into a more scalable, available architecture There are four levels of deployment that you could use with EM12c to achieve higher scalability and availability Of course, as in any architecture requiring both scalability and availability, trade-offs need to be made in terms of increasing cost as performance and availability increase

Level 1

Figure 1-3 shows a level 1 deployment The OMS and repository are installed either on a single host or, more

preferably, on two separate hosts However, neither of these hosts has any failover configured

Level 2

For level 2, the OMS is installed on shared storage and uses VIP-based (virtual IP–based) failover The repository

database is protected by using local physical standby database technology Usually, this means that level 2 deployments use double the number of machines used by level 1 Level 2’s active/passive configuration (albeit located locally rather than having remote passive sites), leads to a downtime window when failing over from the active site to the passive site This architecture is shown in Figure 1-4

EM12c

Console

ActiveOMS

ActiveRepository RepositoryStandby

Shared Storage

Shared Storage

StandbyOMS

Target with

OMA/plug-in

Target withOMA/plug-in

Target withOMA/plug-in

Figure 1-4 Schematic diagram of a level 2 deployment

Level 3

In a level 3 configuration, the OMS is installed using an active/active configuration, requiring a local load balancer

The repository database is protected by both Real Application Clusters (RAC) and local Data Guard This level is shown in Figure 1-5

Level 4

Level 4 is the deployment level providing the most scalability and availability In this case, the OMS is running in

an active/active configuration on a primary site (just like level 3), but additional standby OMS installations are at a remote site (Note that because of network latency requirements between the OMS and the repository being less than

1 millisecond consistently, the remote site cannot be running an active OMS) This configuration requires a local load balancer at both the primary and standby sites The repository database is again running on RAC, but in this case the standby RAC database is located at the disaster recovery site As you can tell, this is quite a complex architecture, shown in Figure 1-6 (without all the lines of communication that would make it even harder to understand)

OMR withRAC / localData GuardLoad balancer

Figure 1-5 Schematic diagram of a level 3 deployment

You’ve now got the gist of the four possible deployment levels Chapter 13 covers them in greater detail in the context of high availability Also, be aware that it is possible to create configurations that do not match these levels exactly Don’t be too surprised if someday you see a configuration slightly different from what’s just been described EM12c provides you a great deal of flexibility.

The Software Library

Another important part of an Enterprise Manager installation is the Software Library The Software Library is a storage area used for such things as patches, Self Update downloads, and gold images It is depicted earlier, in the diagrams

in the section “A High-Availability EM12c Configuration,” as shared storage sitting between the OMSs (Figure 1-5 shows it clearly There you’ll see the shared storage icon almost dead-center) To create the Software Library, you use the Software Library: Administration page, available from the Setup ➤ Provisioning and Patching ➤ Software Library menu path The Software Administration page is shown in Figure 1-7

Active

OMS1

ActiveOMS2

Load balancer

PassiveOMS1

PassiveOMS2Load balancer

Target withOMA Target withOMA Target withOMA

PrimaryRAC OMR

StandbyRAC OMR

Primary Site Standby Site

Figure 1-6 Schematic diagram of a level 4 deployment

One important point to be aware of when creating your Software Library is that you need to ensure that the location you create the Software Library in is accessible from each OMS, if at some stage you believe your EM12c deployment will require some level of high availability This can be achieved by using the same network file system (NFS) share mounted on each OMS, or any other technology that allows sharing file systems between machines.The EM12c release includes several new features related to the Software Library:

In this release, the Software Library becomes the single location for a lot more entities, such

•

as directives and assemblies (These new entities are explained in Chapter 5.) Many of these

entities are self-updateable, so we now have integration with Self Update

Oracle has also expanded the storage-type support, so you now have support for NFS

•

filesystems being shared between OMSs as well as any filesystem that we can reach (that is,

agent filesystems can now be used to host the Software Library as well)

Referenced locations are now supported for the Software Library, so if you have a centralized

•

location for serving these entities that is separate from the OMS, you can now reference those

via HTTP, NFS, and so forth In this case, the OMS stores the metadata about where this

referenced location is, and the software bits are stored externally

A range of other capabilities exist in this release You can, for example, attach support notes

•

or readme files to Software Library entities The library includes improved search capabilities,

and of course the new privilege model allows the use of fine-grained privileges for entity

access

Management Tools

So right about now, you’re probably asking, “Well, what about all those other management tools that Oracle has?” Often you’ll find there’s some level of confusion about what all these tools are, how to differentiate between them, and of course when to use which one Let’s spend some time discussing that now

First, the main point of differentiation between Cloud Control and the other Oracle management tools such as Database Control (DB Control) and Fusion Middleware Control (FMW Control) is the architecture Cloud Control is designed to manage your entire data center, and as such it has a much more robust, multi-tier architecture than you’ll find in the other tools

Figure 1-7 The Software Library: Admnistration page

Second, the other management tools are scaled-down tools that generally connect to only a single environment

at a time, rather than giving you the much broader data center–wide vision of your environment As an example, DB Control can connect to only a single Oracle database at a time If you want to use DB Control to manage or monitor another Oracle database, you have to first disconnect from the original database before connecting to the new one

In fact, if you don’t do that, Oracle will do it for you automatically

Finally, there are some incompatibilities between the different tools For example, when you create an Oracle database by using the Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA), you will be asked whether you want the database

to be managed centrally (via EM12c) or locally (via DB Control) It’s an either/or decision; you can’t choose both This incompatibility reaches its zenith with the OMR When you install EM12c, you are prompted for the location

of the repository (The installer does not create the database for you; it simply prompts you to point to the location

of an existing Oracle database somewhere in your environment.) If the database you point the installer to has been configured by DBCA to be locally managed by DB Control, you will in fact get an error from the installer indicating that the database is already locally managed (The installer does give you the command to remove the DB Control configuration if you so choose, but won’t actually execute the command for you.)

On a final note, at the time of writing this chapter, Oracle has announced that DB Control will be desupported in database releases after 11.2 Although we don’t know yet what the new product will be called, Oracle notes, “In future Oracle Database releases, basic database management will be available through a streamlined management tool, while extensive management capabilities will exist through the latest Oracle Database plug-in deployed from Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control” (see Note 1484775.1 on My Oracle Support for details)

Command-Line Tools

In addition to the GUI that most users of EM12c will use for their day-to-day work, Oracle provides two command-line tools that you need to become familiar with:

Enterprise Manager Command Line Interface (EMCLI): This tool is largely used for scripting

operations that might need to be repeated It is a tool often used by consulting companies

that make a business out of configuring EM12c, who thus have a need to execute the same

operations repeatedly across different customers EMCLI can be installed on any computer

(not necessarily the OMS or OMR) simply by downloading the tool via the Cloud Control

Setup menu and then following the installation instructions Not all operations that can be

performed through the GUI can be performed with EMCLI, however

Enterprise Manager Control (EMCTL): This utility is used for a variety of tasks, the most

important of which are starting, stopping, and checking the status of the OMS, agent, and

Cloud Control itself It is also used to secure/unsecure agents and the OMS, starting and

stopping blackouts and other operations

• CLOUD_ENGINE_USER and CLOUD_SWLIB_USER are used to perform cloud operations

• MGMT_VIEW is used for report generation

• SYSMAN_APM, SYSMAN_MDS, and SYSMAN_OPSS are metadata schemas for Fusion Middleware

components

• SYSMAN_BIP is used for Business Intelligence (BI) Publisher integration

• SYSMAN_RO is a general-purpose, read-only user

Not much detail is provided in the Oracle documentation on these accounts Suffice it to say, though, that these are all special accounts that you should not drop Nor should you change their passwords

Repository Views

Information about administrators, targets, metrics, blackouts, and jobs is all kept in the Oracle Management

Repository in a group of repository views Although the information in these views is obviously used by the Cloud Control console to display that information to you, it can also be used in other ways, primarily by a programmer building extensibility on top of the Enterprise Manager product As a plug-in developer, for example, you may want to extend Enterprise Manager to manage your own, custom-developed targets, or indeed expand on the target types that Oracle provides out of the box You may also want to write your own scripts to query historical data from these views,

or build your own custom reports to run from SQL Developer or other products Clearly, a chapter on the Enterprise Manager architecture is not the place to drill into gory details on how to do all these things, but it is worthwhile to understand what these repository views are and how to find more information about them

The repository views are documented as part of the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Extensibility Programmer’s

Reference (you can access this from the EM12c documentation located at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/index.htm) Chapter 18 of that online reference details the use of those views, along with a complete listing of the views displaying the column names for each view

Three main protocols are used to communicate between the components in an EM12c installation:

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Hypertext Transfer Protocol/Secure (HTTP/S): These

are the underlying protocols used by the World Wide Web They define how messages are

transmitted and formatted, as well as the actions that browsers and web servers take in

response to different commands HTTP and HTTP/S are used to communicate between the

OMA, OMS, and OMR For security reasons, Oracle typically recommends using HTTP/S

rather than HTTP

Java Database Connectivity (JDBC): This Java standard is used by the OMS to communicate

with the repository, as well as to communicate with any database targets

Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP): This protocol is used by the OMS to

communicate with a host, to check the status of the host Essentially, a ping command is

used to check its status

During the EM12c installation, you are prompted to supply a list of ports for entities to communicate on A default list

is provided on the Port Configuration Details page, shown in Figure 1-8 The page displays a Recommended Port Range column The first port number listed in this column is the default port If for any reason the default port is already used when you are doing an installation, the next port number in the Recommended Port Range will be used Post installation, you can also find the port numbers that were used in the staticports.ini file, located on the OMS host

Figure 1-8 The Port Configuration Details page

Firewalls

In many cases, a business will require firewalls to be used to control both outgoing and incoming network

traffic This typically involves restricting either the availability of ports or the type of traffic that can pass through

a particular port Because this restriction can be difficult to set up, it is usually recommended that firewall

configuration and enablement are left until after you have deployed your Enterprise Manager configuration However, if the firewalls are already in place, you should open the communication ports you are planning to use until the installation is complete

Authentication in EM12c

With the new pluggable framework that is available to you in the EM12c release, you now have more options as far as authentication is concerned The framework accepts a range of pluggable authentication schemes, enabling you to choose the methods that are most suitable to your environment Because EM12c relies on Oracle’s WebLogic Server for external authentication, any authentication method that WLS supports can be used to authenticate to EM12c Supported authentication methods include the following:

Repository-based authentication: In this default authentication option that you might

be familiar with from previous releases of Enterprise Manager, you are prompted for a

username and password Standard password options—such as password lifetime, password

grace, number of failed attempts, and password complexity—are available with this

authentication method

Single sign-on authentication: If you use single sign-on (SSO) authentication in your

enterprise, you can register those SSO credentials as an administrator in EM12c

You can then use those credentials to access the Cloud Control console

Oracle Access Manager SSO authentication: Oracle Access Manager (OAM) is the SSO

solution supplied with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware product Again, if you are using OAM

SSO, you can register those credentials as an administrator in EM12c and use them to

access the console

Agent

TargetHost

7799

7788

1521 4900

4889 3872 3872

ICMP

JDBC

HTTP

HTTP/S

Figure 1-9 Ports, protocols, and firewalls in an EM12c configuration

Pulling these three areas (protocols, ports, and firewalls) together, the default communication flows in an EM12c installation are shown in Figure 1-9

Enterprise User Security authentication: EUS allows you to create and store enterprise users

and roles as directory objects in a directory server compliant with the Lightweight Directory

Access Protocol ( LDAP) You can then use EMCTL to set some properties to allow you to

drill into those databases without displaying the standard logon pages

LDAP authentication: In previous releases of Enterprise Manager, LDAP authentication was

allowed, but it was restricted to Oracle’s LDAP solution, Oracle Internet Directory (OID)

In the 12c release, that has now been extended to allow you to use Microsoft’s Active

Directory product in addition to OID

Summary

This chapter has introduced you to the major architectural components of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: the Cloud Control console, the Oracle Management Agent, the Oracle Management Service, the Oracle Management Repository, and plug-ins You’ve looked at options for deploying this architecture and the authentication methods you can use to connect to EM12c This chapter also covered the protocols, ports, and firewalls used by EM12c, so you’re now ready to drill into the installation of the product in more detail That’s the subject of our next chapter

Installation and Agent Deployment

by Gokhan Atil

In this chapter, you will learn how to create a repository database and install Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c If you have any experience with installing Enterprise Manager Grid Control (the ancestor of Cloud Control), you’ll see that EM12c comes with a smarter installation wizard, so the installation is much easier

EM12c consists of three components: Oracle Management Service (OMS), Oracle Management Agents

(management agents), and Oracle Management Repository (management repository)

This chapter’s demonstration of the installation and agent deployment uses three servers:

cloudcontrol12.testdomain.com: Oracle Management Service will be installed to this

server

repositorydb.testdomain.com: This database server will host the management

repository

target.testdomain.com: Management agents will be deployed to this target server

All of these servers are running Oracle Linux 5.8 (64-bit) as well as the GNOME desktop environment and the

X Window System

Although you can install both the management repository and OMS on same server, we prefer to install the management repository on a separate server If you’re planning to install both on the same server, you should accommodate the requirements for both installations

We recommend that you use a Domain Name System (DNS) server to solve the hostnames of the servers If you

do not have a DNS server, you need to enter the hostnames and corresponding IPs of all targets into /etc/hosts on the Oracle Management Server You also need to enter the hostname/IP address of OMS into the /etc/hosts file on all target servers (to which you’ll deploy the management agent)

It’s also important to use fully qualified hostnames A fully qualified domain name (FQDN) is a complete domain name for a server It contains both a hostname and a domain name to specify its exact location in the DNS hierarchy For example, cloudcontrol12.testdomain.com is a fully qualified hostname At least ensure that your Oracle Management Server has a fully qualified hostname

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c can fetch the latest patch information from My Oracle Support for your servers and can create service requests for incidents Therefore, we recommend that you enable Oracle Management Service to reach the My Oracle Support web site If you don’t want to allow your servers to directly access the Internet, you can set up a proxy server to make the My Oracle Support web site accessible to OMS

Meeting Hardware Requirements

This section describes the hardware requirements for installing OMS, the management repository, and management agents

Hardware Requirements for OMS

As you can see in Table 2-1, the hardware requirements for OMS depend on the number of targets you have and the number of agents you’ll deploy

Table 2-1 Hardware Requirements for OMS

1 OMS Fewer than 1,000 targets Fewer than 100 agents Fewer than 10 concurrent user sessions

2 OMSs 1,000–9,999 targets 100–999 agents 10–24 concurrent user sessions

3 or more OMSs 10,000 or more targets 1,000 or more agents 25–50 concurrent user sessions

Table 2-2 Hardware Requirements for the Management Repository

1 OMS Fewer than 1,000 targets Fewer than 100 agents Fewer than 10 concurrent user sessions

2 OMSs 1,000–9,999 targets 100–999 agents –10–24 concurrent user sessions

3 or more OMSs 10,000 or more targets 1,000 or more agents 25–50 concurrent user sessions

Hardware Requirements for Management Repository

Hardware requirements for the repository database also depend on the number of agents and targets, as shown in Table 2-2

Hardware Requirements for Management Agents

Each agent deployment requires approximately 1GB of free hard disk space Although management agents do not consume large amounts of CPU or RAM, we do not recommend deploying agents to systems with less than 512MB

of RAM

■ the hardware requirements in the preceding sections may change from version to version, so you should check the actual requirements in the oracle enterprise manager Cloud Control Basic Installation guide.

Installing Management Repository

In this section, you’ll download and install Oracle Database 11gR2 on the server named repositorydb.testdomain.com.It’s possible to use one of the certified databases: 11.2.0.3, 11.2.0.2, 11.2.0.1, 11.1.0.7, or 10.2.0.5 If you already have a database server for the repository database, you can skip to the installation of Oracle EM12c

Tip

■ you can find an up-to-date list of certified databases for enterprise manager Cloud Control on my oracle support: https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/CertifyHome you may want to use an oracle real application Clusters (raC) database for high availability.

Using the Oracle-Validated RPM Package and YUM

In order to install Oracle Database 11gR2 on Oracle Linux, your system needs to meet a few prerequisites Using the oracle-validated RPM package, you can complete most of the preinstallation configuration tasks including creating

a user and groups Using this package is the recommended way to install all the Oracle prerequisites on Oracle Linux You can download the RPM package from the Oracle web site, or you can use the YUM package manager Oracle provides a free public yum server that you can use even if you don’t buy support from Oracle

To use the Oracle public yum server, you first need to download and copy the appropriate yum configuration file

in place, by running the following commands as ROOT:

Oracle Linux 4, update 6 or newer

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[root@repositorydb ~]# cd /etc/yum.repos.d

[root@repositorydb ~]# mv Oracle-Base.repo Oracle-Base.repo.disabled

[root@repositorydb ~]# wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-el4.repo

[root@repositorydb ~]# wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-ol6.repo

Open the yum public-yum*.repo configuration file in a text editor Locate the section in the file for the repository you plan to update from—for instance, [el5_base]—and change enabled=0 to enabled=1

Save the file and start using yum:

[root@repositorydb ~]# yum install oracle-validated

For Oracle Linux 6, you need to install the oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall package instead of the oracle-validated package:

[root@repositorydb ~]# yum install oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall

You can also manually download the oracle-validated package for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 from the following link: https://oss.oracle.com/el5/oracle-validated/

After you install oracle-validated, you need to set the password for the ORACLE user Be sure that you also set up YUM and install the oracle-validated package for the OMS server

Creating Oracle User and Groups

If you do not want to use the oracle-validated package, you can create the required groups and user manually Log

in as ROOT and run the following commands:

[root@repositorydb ~]# groupadd oinstall

[root@repositorydb ~]# groupadd dba

[root@repositorydb ~]# useradd -g oinstall -G dba oracle

[root@repositorydb ~]# passwd oracle

After the last command, enter the password for the ORACLE user

Setting Kernel Parameters

The Oracle Database 11gR2 installer can detect and fix errors on kernel parameters, so you can run the installer and let it create scripts to set required parameters If you want to configure kernel parameters without the help of the installer, make a backup of /etc/sysctl.conf and then use any text editor to edit the file so that it includes lines similar to the following:

Enter the following command to set the current values of the kernel parameters in /etc/sysctl.conf:

[root@repositorydb ~]# /sbin/sysctl -p

Creating Required Directories

The Oracle base directory must have at least 5GB of free disk space Enter commands to the following to create the recommended subdirectories and set the appropriate owner, group, and permissions on them:

[root@repositorydb ~]# mkdir -p /u01/app/

[root@repositorydb ~]# chown -R oracle:oinstall /u01/app/

[root@repositorydb ~]# chmod -R 775 /u01/app/

Installing the Oracle Database Software

To install the database software, you need to download the installation files, unzip them, and then run the installer All the steps are laid out in this section

You can download the Oracle database software from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) The software is available in zip files Here’s the link for Oracle Database:

[oracle@repositorydb ~]$ unzip linux_11gR2_database_1of2.zip

[oracle@repositorydb ~]$ unzip linux_11gR2_database_2of2.zip

After unzipping the files, you will see a newly created directory named database Open this directory and run the installer:

[oracle@repositorydb ~]$ cd database

[oracle@repositorydb ~]$ /runInstaller

When the installer starts, complete the following steps:

1 The first installer step is Configure Security Updates, shown in Figure 2-1 You may prefer

not to enter My Oracle Support (MOS) credentials because you will be able to follow

all security updates by using Cloud Control So deselect the I Wish to Receive Security

Updates option and click Next The installer warns about the importance of receiving

critical security updates, but ignore the warning

2 The Download Software Updates step, shown in Figure 2-2, appears If your database server has Internet access, you should enter your MOS credentials to download and apply the latest patches (In this example, we’ll skip this step and apply critical patch set updates manually.) After selecting the appropriate option, click Next.

Figure 2-1 The Oracle Database installer

3 For the Select Installation Option step, shown in Figure 2-3, select Install Database

Software Only Then click Next

Figure 2-2 Options for downloading software updates

4 In the Grid Installation Options step, shown in Figure 2-4, select Single Instance Database Installation Then click Next (If you wanted to create the OEM repository database as an Oracle RAC database, you would select the second or third option.)

Figure 2-3 Installation options

5 Select English for the default language, as shown in Figure 2-5.

Figure 2-4 Grid installation options

6 Now you’re ready to select a database edition This server will be used only as the

repository database of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, so you don’t need to pay

a license fee for Oracle Database Select Enterprise Edition, as shown in Figure 2-6, and click Next

Figure 2-5 Language options

7 The Specify Installation Location step appears, as shown in Figure 2-7 You created

/u01/app for Oracle Database, so enter /u01/app/oracle for the Oracle base

directory The installer will determine the Oracle home according to the Optimal

Flexible Architecture (OFA) Out-of-place upgrades have always been a best-practice

recommendation, but starting with Oracle Database 11.2.0.2, patch set installations are all

out of place by default So you may prefer to enter the full version in the path, such as

/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0.3/dbhome_1

Figure 2-6 Selecting the database edition

8 Enter (or just accept) the Inventory Directory and click Next, as shown in Figure 2-8.

Figure 2-7 Installation location

9 For the Privileged Operating System Groups step, shown in Figure 2-9, accept the defaults

and click Next Oracle checks the prerequisites in the following step If it doesn’t find any

errors, the installer advances to the Summary step

Figure 2-8 Creating the inventory directory

10 Review the Summary screen, shown in Figure 2-10 Click the Install button if the information onscreen seems OK.

Figure 2-9 Operating system groups

11 At the end of the installation, you need to execute some configuration scripts Log in as

ROOT to the server in another terminal session and run the scripts Then click OK to finish

the installation (see Figure 2-11)

Figure 2-10 Summary

Creating the Repository Database

Now that you have installed the Oracle Database software, you will create the management repository database Connect to the repository server, set the Oracle home, and run dbca:

[oracle@repositorydb ~]$ oraenv

ORACLE_SID = [oracle] ? oracle

ORACLE_HOME = [/home/oracle] ? /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1

The Oracle base has been set to /u01/app/oracle

2 For the Database Templates step, shown in Figure 2-13, you can select General Purpose

or Custom Database We recommend that you select Custom Database because it will

prevent the installation of some SYSMAN objects in the database Otherwise, you have

to remove these objects from the database before you can use it as the management

repository database Click Next

Figure 2-13 Database templates

Figure 2-12 Database Configuration Assistant

3 The Database Identification step appears, as shown in Figure 2-14 Enter the global database name, and the installer will set the SID according to that name Click Next.

4 For the Management Options step, shown in Figure 2-15, deselect Configure Enterprise Manager and then click Next

Figure 2-15 Management options

Figure 2-14 Database identification

5 Enter the passwords for SYS and SYSTEM users in the Database Credentials step, shown

in Figure 2-16, and then click Next Oracle recommends entering a password with a

minimum of eight characters, including at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter,

and one digit

Figure 2-16 Database credentials

6 Accept the defaults for the database file locations and click Next

7 You can enable archiving now in the Recovery Configuration step, shown in Figure 2-17,

or you can enable it later Set the Fast Recovery Area (FRA) destination and size, and then

click Next

8 For the Database Content step, shown in Figure 2-18, deselect all components, because you do not need them for the repository database Then click the Standard Database Components button.

Figure 2-17 Recovery options

Figure 2-18 Database content

9 In the Standard Database Components dialog box, deselect Oracle Multimedia and Oracle

Application Express, as shown in Figure 2-19 Click OK to close the dialog box and then

click Next to advance to the next step

Figure 2-19 Standard database components

10 While setting the memory (see Figure 2-20), ensure that total memory (SGA_max_size +

PGA_aggregate_target) set for the database will not exceed 75 percent of the total

physical memory of the system Otherwise, the system will start using the swap device We

recommendthat you do not use the memory_target parameter with Enterprise Manager

Next click the Character Sets tab

11 For the Initialization Parameters step, shown in Figure 2-21, select Use Unicode (AL32UTF8) Set the National Character Set option to any UTF-supported character set, such as AL16UTF16 or UTF8 Then click Next.

Figure 2-20 Memory parameters

Figure 2-21 Database character set

12 The Database Storage step appears, as shown in Figure 2-22 The management repository’s

redo log file size should be a minimum of 300MB Set the File Size option to 300MB for all

three redo log groups, and then click Next

13 Click the Finish button to review the configuration and create the database (see Figure 2-23)

Figure 2-22 Database storage

Figure 2-23 Creation options